Early Access

Game development is an enormous undertaking, and games are never truly finished.

It’s impossible to make a perfect or bug-free game, and feedback is extremely vital in making a polished game. This is why on August 7th, 2015, we decided to release Close Order via Steam Early Access.

Justifiably, many consumers are biased against the Early Access model. We understand that, especially since many games using that system are never finished, or the company can even go under in some extreme cases.

Even though all odds were against us, we embraced this mentality. “Early Access was the best decision we ever made,” says Nicholas. “The game was rough, in need of polish, and very light on content. But the community helped us fix all of that, and more!”

Throughout the rest of the year, the team completely overhauled the game. A few things that they did were:

Threw out and rebuilt enemy AI and related systems, creating new ones from the ground up

Completely reworked all story-based levels

Squashed thousands of bugs

Added unlock-based progression for player

Created in-depth tutorial to better explain the game’s mechanics

Added brand-new user interfaces throughout the game

Plugged a nasty memory leak

Included individual backstory cinematics for each level in the story mode

… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Close Order that launched in August is a far cry from what would become the final product, in terms of both depth and quality.

This is entirely thanks to our dedicated community, who wished to see our game evolve into its greatest potential, and our incredibly hard-working and devoted team, who believed in our crazy idea of building an armada on the fly.

With Close Order, we truly saw the joy of interacting with customers, finding out what they liked and disliked, and applying feedback directly to our development process.